Tuskegee Airmen: Fighting war and racism

Wednesday

Feb 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMFeb 27, 2008 at 9:59 PM

Escorting bombers over Nazi Germany required courage, but perhaps more daunting was the discrimination the Tuskegee Airmen faced back home, according to Luther E. McIlwain, one of the last living members of the nation's first black military flying group.

Nancy Olesin

Escorting bombers over Nazi Germany required courage, but perhaps more daunting was the discrimination the Tuskegee Airmen faced back home, according to Luther E. McIlwain, one of the last living members of the nation's first black military flying group.

McIlwain, 86, of Methuen served in the Army Air Corps from 1943 to 1947 with the 477th Bomber Group, and Monday he visited Cisco Systems Inc. as part of Black History Month to tell the story about the fabled airmen.

Just getting into the Air Corps was difficult for men of any race, McIlwain said, but as a black man, he even faced racism at the recruiting station in downtown Columbia, S.C., where he went first to enlist.

In 1942, McIlwain was a sophomore at Allen University in Columbia and was sure he would be drafted. Many of his friends had college educations, but the Army was using them as simple laborers.

"I was (classified) 1A and I'm thinking I'd be cleaning latrines," McIlwain said. After a chance meeting with a friend who was entering flight school at Tuskegee Institute, the famed Alabama school for blacks founded by Booker T. Washington, McIlwain headed to the recruiting station.

"I'd never been downtown," McIlwain said ... "I'm in Columbia, South Carolina, and I'm scared to go downtown. ... At college, I'd had friends who'd had fathers who had been lynched; mothers and sisters who'd been raped. ... If you was me, you wouldn't have gone downtown neither. I was afraid."

The experience is seared in his mind. After getting up the nerve to go to the recruiting station, five white recruiters threatened him after he told them he wanted to be a pilot.

"I got so frightened about what they (said they) were going to do to me that I ran out of there," said McIlwain. "That's 60-some years ago, and if I was an artist, I could paint a picture of me running out of there ..."

Later, fate lent him a hand.

His girlfriend's mother's boss was South Carolina's game warden, and he helped him get to nearby Fort Jackson where he was able to enlist. After a stint at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, N.C., he passed the exam enabling him to enter the Army Air Corps pilot training program.

Many of the War Department's airfields were in the deep South, McIlwain said, and most of the flight instructors were white Southerners.

"Most of the instructors, by their training, were racist," he said.

The racial cauldron made him and his comrades stronger people, McIlwain said.

"I consider myself a fortunate adult. If you listen closely to my story, because my story is no different than so many others who were left out, because of what discrimination does."

With the unit, he served as pilot, navigator and bombardier.

The Tuskegee Airmen had a strong bond that remains among those who are still alive, he said.

"We suffered together, we flew together, we told jokes together, we ate together, we got arrested together and we got bloody together. And we were encouragement to each other, because that's all we had."

During World War II, "The Lonely Eagles" as the Tuskegee Airmen called themselves, flew more than 15,000 combat sorties over Europe and North Africa. As a bomber escort group, they never lost a bomber to enemy fighters.

On March 29, 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen, including McIlwain, were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress, in a ceremony at the Capitol.

That honor means a lot to him, said McIlwain, who served 20 years with the New York Police Department.

"The first one for Congress to give was to George Washington," McIlwain said. "I always like to think now about the company I keep."

For more information about the Tuskegee Airmen, go to http://tuskegeeairmen.org.

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